Who Pinched My Ride?

When thieves stole his beloved ­commuter bike on a busy street in broad daylight, PATRICK SYMMES snapped—and set out on a cross-­country plunge into the heart of ­America’s bike-crime underbelly. What he saw will ­rattle your frame.

Certainly the king of bike thieves has been found. In 2008, a quirky Toronto bike-shop owner named Igor Kenk turned out to have 2,865 stolen bikes squirreled away in his store and various warehouses. Kenk, considered the most prolific bike thief in the world, is a messy, dyspeptic Slovenian intellectual who before he was caught lived in a fancy house and associated with the classical music scene. Yet his method was brutally mundane: Kenk was finally caught pointing out bikes he wanted stolen to a mentally ill person, whom he paid with drugs. He served just over a year in jail and is already back out.

-Outside

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law’s VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

-Wired

North Korean party rock anthem

Ain't no party like a Pyongyang party, 'cause a Pyongyang party is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. Perhaps all those synchronized marching demonstrations for Kim Jong-Il were because he just wanted to get down.

-You Tube

Dirty Car Art Gallery

Scott Wade's Dirty Pictures - or how playing in the dirt became an obsession...

Un premier point pour l'Impact dans la MLS

(Montréal) L'Impact devra encore attendre avant de savourer sa première victoire dans la MLS, mais il a au moins engrangé le premier point de son histoire avec un match nul de 1-1 face au Fire de Chicago. 58 912 personnes ont assisté à cette première montréalaise au Stade olympique.


-La Presse

Making murder respectable Phoney politeness and muddled messages: a guide to euphemisms

SHORT sharp terms make big points clear. But people often prefer to soften their speech with euphemism: a mixture of abstraction, metaphor, slang and understatement that offers protection against the offensive, harsh or blunt. In 1945, in one of history’s greatest euphemisms, Emperor Hirohito informed his subjects of their country’s unconditional surrender (after two atomic bombs, the loss of 3m people and with invasion looming) with the words, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

-The Economist

Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas Retracing Hunter S. Thompson's famous steps, 40 years later

In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson¹s ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. Here are parts one and two of a four-part series.

-The Daily

6 Hugely Successful Products Originally Invented for Something Else

Some of the world’s most famous, civilization-altering discoveries happened by accident. Take Penicillin, for example. The guy who discovered it, Sir Alexander Fleming, simply forgot to clean up his work station one night and returned to discover the world’s first antibiotic growing right there in his unwashed petri dish.

But that’s not what this particular list is about. All the inventions here were invented very much on purpose – they just didn’t end up being used in the way their inventors had intended. Only after these inventions were repurposed – often in wildly unexpected ways – did they become famous, perhaps even civilization-alteringly so.

-mental_floss